Desertification risk assesment of natural pine forest lands in the upper Engiz basin with semi-humid ecological conditions

The aim of this study is to make a desertification risk assessment of natural pine forest lands by taking into account the indicators considered in the DIS4ME approach in the desertification risk assessment of areas covered with pine forests in Engiz district of Samsun province. In the desertification risk assessment, 8 indicators (rainfall, drought, soil texture, stoniness, vegetation cover, slope, depth and aspect) were considered. However, apart from the DIS4ME approach, the indicator values considered in this thesis were not taken from the model and were made more sensitive with the Fuzzy-AHP approach. For this purpose, 73 surface soil samples were taken from the area to determine the basic physico-chemical properties of the soils. In terms of desertification risk in Engiz natural pine forests, the lowest desertification risk of the area was 1.088 and the highest desertification risk was 1.327. The results obtained after estimating the data of the model result with artificial neural network were obtained as the lowest 1,095 and the highest 1,326. It was determined that the area is generally under risk in terms of desertification and the results obtained from artificial neural networks are parallel to these results.